Hosted by Microsoft Azure

Menu

Category Archives: Projects

To establish peer to peer (p2p) communication on iOS devices there is an API for that known as the Multipeer Connectivity framework. There are a couple of things to bear in mind about this framework:

Discovers and connects with iOS devices but will not discover devices on other platforms like Android

Maximum number of 7 invitees (client peers)

Will raise a prompt for user acceptance of a peer connection request

Intro to Thali project for iOS

Thali is an experimental open source p2p project that promises to enable p2p web to run on mobile devices. This is quite a big undertaking so to make life easier to begin with we can start to look at the iOS to iOS p2p connectivity story which is documented as Thali “Story -1”.
The spec will use the TCP internet standard to transport data across peers therefore all mobile devices will run a Node.js layer. In order to run Node.js on iOS we use a Cordova plugin which runs JXCore. This will then connect with a native TCP bridge which will relay the data over the iOS Multipeer Connectivity framework. The flow is illustrated in the diagram below:

How to build Thali demo for iOS

If you like playing with bleeding edge code you can build the “Story -1” iOS dev branch. (NB: You will need two iOS devices with Bluetooth 4.0 support.)